Does BHUSD have OCD?

Does our School District have OCD?

Our community bestows a lot of money and resources on our school district - because we take our children's education very seriously.  As parent's we spend countless hours attending events, encouraging studies and generally trying to help our children make good choices.  We keep telling our students that good choices and priorities are the prerequisites to success.

It's just such a pity our district can't seem to prioritize in a similarly methodical manner.  For over a month now the high school swimming pool has been a debacle and effectively the entire water polo season has been lost.  First the floor wouldn't work, then the electrical circuits failed and now the water heater is broken.  Our girls are being bused to downtown LA for practice!

Meanwhile our beloved board has determined to get again waste more money and time on designing a fence for the high school.  There was community outrage just a couple of years ago but it seems bad ideas just keep returning.  And returning.  And returning.

So let's go through this - again.  I have had cause to work with some of the most prestigious private security organizations in the world and they have consistently provided guidance that the most important aspect to security is response to an incident.  A fence around our high school will only draw security resources from proximity to the classrooms and halls where incidents occur to the periphery.  Security personnel at the fence will INCREASE response times and history teaches that perimeter defenses are largely a waste of time - just ask our own kids how the Maginot Line worked out.  At best a fence will give our children a false sense of security and ill prepare them for being aware of their surroundings when they go to college.

Separately, how does this even get considered given all the deferred maintenance and other failings?  Last time this came up, it was rightly pointed out that any fence would have to be ripped down for the seismic trench and for planned construction of new facilities when the high school is redesigned.

Protecting empty buildings while our children are being bused all over the city because the basics are falling apart is either incompetence or a medical condition.  Only organizational Obsessive Compulsive Disorder on the part of our district can explain the return of such bad ideas as a fence.